Clark founded Silicon Graphics Inc on the 9th of November in 1981, and he left Stanford early in 1982 to pursue building the company full time with just $25000 in funding (around $85000 in 2024) from a friend and the contents of his own accounts. Accompanying Clark in this adventure were Kurt Akeley, Dave Brown, Tom Davis, Mark Grossman, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, Rocky Rhodes, and Abbey Silverstone. While SGI knew they would deal in computers outfitted with a powerful GPU, they did not know precisely what else those computers should feature. As a result, Clark asked potential customers what they’d like to see in a workstation. While at least one potential customer was interested in VMS, NASA’s new Advanced Supercomputing division was very interested in UNIX and they were willing to pay. The division’s director at the time spoke with Clark, and (verbally) committed to purchasing at least eighteen workstations in their first order.
Bradford Morgan White
SGI machines are by far the most sought-after and most expensive of the retro UNIX workstation market today, with machines still netting thousands of euros, even for damaged or less than ideal examples. IRIX is probably also the dead UNIX with the most active fanbase, still releasing software and updates to this very day.
An SGI machine is high on my list, and writing an article about using IRIX today is something I’ve been wanting to do for decades. Sadly, the odds of finding one that’s both affordable and shippable to the Arctic part of Sweden – especially now that OSAlert is my full-time job and I’m dependent on Patreons and donations – are very, very slim.
I have worked with some back in the day. Being able to use a Solaris workstation to remotely access to SGI graphics server (IRIX) and have the OpenGL rendered via that pipe was “futuristic”. Today of course that is no longer exciting.
Back then, IRIX was pretty much required to do real graphics. I was working in a large virtual reality lab (literally large, it was an entire room to render the image), however today remote rendering can be done on the web, and the local ARM machines are more than capable than older SGI top of the line workstations, and local GPUs are then excellent servers.
Anyway, the most “final” scene was seeing a large trash container marked “Property of Silicon Graphics Interactive” at the Google campus. Then I realized the “creative destruction” of free markets was actually a positive force, and no longer needed to delve into nostalgia.
(Why telnet if we have ssh for example)?
I worked @ SGI as an intern. Fun times! Alas, you could clearly see the writing in the wall, since they wasted tons of cash on idiotic purchases that net them close to zero value. Their culture simply didn’t understand economies of scale. It was a pretty badly managed company.
Good hardware, not great at management – I still have a few SGI machines, including one with a large SCSI RAID array – state of the art at the time, now just nostalgia. Another company put out of business by commodity hardware and the rest of the world doing it cheaper and “Good Enough”. Lots of good companies killed by poor ability to provide compelling solutions that were competitive. Exhibit 1: DEC, Sun, SGI, DG, Commodore.
I owned a O2 for a while. IMNSHO IRIX was already so sad that I ended up installing Debian. The joke, many years earlier, among Macintosh users was: “yeah, great graphics (Jurassic Park years), but can it run SimpleText?”
Quick answer: no.
And I wasted about 1.5k on that piece of obsolete plastic.
SGI is still one of those brands that I look back on with fondness. They were the best of the best at one point. For a decade, if you wanted to win an Oscar for animation, you had to do it on an SGI.
They made good tech and were an early Open Source supporter. XFS was my go to filesystem until recently. I am sure the Linux machine I am typing on is running lots of software calling into their C++ STL.
I have a couple of Indys sitting around but it it has been quite a while since they booted up. I should take another look at IRIX one of these days.
You see, Silicon Graphics is one thing. SGI was just a new brand for the Itanic…
Fair enough. I concede that I was being a bit sloppy with my branding. I was not trying to convey the point in time that the company had formally renamed itself “SGI”. You are not wrong though that they were thoroughly hitched to the Itanium star by the end and it certainly did not work out well for them. They are one of the companies that paid the most for Intel’s mistakes. HP got hit pretty hard too but they had a lot more to fall back on.
You could also talk about the rise and fall of MIPS as mostly it follows the SGI arc. That said, MIPS is still with us. Ironically, the purest expressions of MIPS still available are probably Loongson ( China ) and KOMDIV ( Russia ) which are pretty much illegal in the USA now. In some ways though, RISC-V is the continuation of MIPS and, in that respect, it is just getting started.
Xtensa is basically a MIPS 2.0 and it is everywhere, especially as radio and DSP chips; RISC-V is more MIPS 3.0.
I am not familiar with the Xtensa ISA. Is it similar to MIPS? I know one of the founders was involved with MIPS. All I could find is this paper on Xtensa claiming binaries take up half as much space as MIPS ones.
https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ELE572Papers/Fall04Readings/ComputerArchitecture/xtensaoverview.pdf
My favourite thing about that paper is the “Editorial Calendar” section at the end ( year 2000 ). It includes this gem…
September-October
Microprocessors of the 21st Century, Part 2—Intel’s Itanium Processor
Formerly known as both Merced and the IA-64, this hot microprocessor is explained in detail by Intel authors
Back in my News Ltd days, I recall one of our divisions throwing out dozens and dozens of SGI workstations, they were used as part of the production workflow for newspapers and magazines. All replaced by Macs.
When was that? Sounds like a haul that would be worth a fortune today.
Part of me wonders whether (if these guys were still around), each new version of Windows would still be progressively getting worse. Imagine a parallel universe where SGI was in direct competition with Windows, keeping their behavior in check. I also wonder the same thing about BeOS.
At the same time, in spite of how terrible the world is today, it is pretty awesome that I can take any random hardware, be it brand new or recycled, install Linux onto it, and have a professional Unix-like workstation (similar to an SGI machine), either for cheap or for free.
My point exactly! By the time I bought that O2 on eBay CDE was already looking sad and old. GNOME was all the rage those days…
As I said earlier: “can it run SimpleText”? No.
These days I switch between Tiny11 and Mint (I just frigging LOVE Cinnamon!)
I’m an Archeologist, so I really do appreciate that some of us really care about the past. BUT there is a difference of value: a working BeBox is a treasure. A Silicon Graphics O2 with IRIX and CDE? No way, just… no way.
Nevermind Windows. The big “what if” for SGI is that they could have been NVIDIA. Who knows what their Itanium misadventures cost us.
I am not sure that BeOS would have created anymore competition than MacOS ( NeXTstep ) has in the end. The world would probably look similar.
FWIW SGI had no choice but to go with Itanium.
Also SGI never really developed the culture for consumer products, so they also would have never been NVIDIA. Even when they tried to enter the PC space, they couldn’t help themselves and basically released one of the few non compatible PCs using x86 in history. Which takes a special kind of talent
Despite NVIDIA’s dominance in PC gaming, I do not really think of them as a consumer products company. I was thinking for 3D, machine learning, embedded, crypto, and now of course Generative AI.
I have Fuel I purchased and I still use it sometimes. Amazing beast, amazingly loud!
SGI Fuel? You mean your pension fund?
I’m insanely jealous. Oof.
I have an SGi O2, it was released in 1996 and can run Quake 3 from 1999. Impressive little machine, just a shame that I can’t upgrade the CPU to 900MHz, it’s a theoretical upgrade (the chips exist but the BIOS/firmware needs to be hacked to allow it).
Man I loved that company and wanted them to succeed. Bought a lot of boxes…the world was different. Every new wave of bosses couldn’t comprehend what actual engineering workstations & software cost.
Their support was great. I too used xfs for years solely because I bet my tail on it at work for a lot of years and it was always solid. Followed Christoph (hch) on lkml for a while.
In the end, “good enough” won at my shop, too. Held on to piles of Indigos and Indy and Octane blah blah…just hoping NetBSD or someone would allow a port that made sense. In the end, we changed hands 3X and went through bankruptcy twice in 5 years and the new kids flew in and tossed the whole pile.
Beautiful hardware, but a lot of things were sideways for *nix then, too. I did love things abotu Irix, but it’s all hazy now.